Sunday, November 20, 2011

Newt Gingrich supports child labor as solution to poverty

There are, of course, any number of reasons not to like Newt Gingrich and to think he'd be a terrible choice for Republicans next year. We'll get into many of those reasons here in the coming days, and as long as he's a viable top-tier candidate, but for now let's just focus on one of them:

Newt Gingrich tonight said at an address at Harvard that child work
laws "entrap" poor children into poverty - and suggested that a better
way to handle failing schools is to fire the janitors, hire the local
students and let them get paid for upkeep.

The comment came in response to an undergrad's question about income equality during his talk at Harvard's Kennedy School.

"This is something that no liberal wants to deal
with," Gingrich said. "Core policies of protecting unionization and
bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods,
crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to
create income inequality in the United States than any other single
policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping
children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.

"You say to somebody, you shouldn't go to work before you're what,
14, 16 years of age, fine. You're totally poor. You're in a school that
is failing with a teacher that is failing. I've tried for years to have a
very simple model," he said. "Most of these schools ought to get rid of
the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students
to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would
have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the
process of rising."

Of course, there are also any number of reasons he's popular with conservatives, and here he hits several right-wing buttons at once: unions are bad, government regulation ruins the economy, public schools are failing, children have no rights, the poor are really only poor because they don't work hard enough, and income inequality is the fault of government and unions and the left generally.

He's wrong on all counts, but all across the country conservative knees are jerking. Steve M. explains it well:

If you're a fan of far-right demagoguery, there's so much to admire here. Notice how the simple act of paying people to clean and maintain scholls is now "bureaucratization." (Boo! Hiss!) Notice how the main enemy seems to be liberals -- and not just liberals, but eggheady, social-engineering-obsessed, bureaucratizing
liberals (a class of people he demonizes at Harvard, no less) ... and
yet Newt's attack also takes out evil broom-wielding union thugs.

But there's more. This is for the children. Making them clean the schools is good
for them. This plays in the brains of wingnuts one of two ways: either
(a) they imagine hoodlums and ruffians being kept off the streets by
doing the sort of work they should just be consigned to at birth and
forced to accept for life, or (b) they think this is how you save the
underclass from a life of liberal dependency, by turning them into a
sort of neckerchief-wearing Gingrich Youth, a cadre of Young Newtian
Pioneers doing vigorous labor as a means of refuting the notion that the
nation has gone flabby.

It would seem that Newt is just the new anti-Romney (following in the footsteps of Bachmann, Perry, and Cain), but the more I think about it the less sure I am. I thought he was done a long time ago, his campaign over save for his desire for more of the spotlight to enhance the Gingrich brand, but he may actually have some staying power -- if only because his rivals on the right, specifically Perry, are so weak. And it helps that, despite often veering from Republican orthodoxy (remember when he criticized Paul Ryan?), he can feed the conservative Republican penchant for cruelty and brutality with such enthusiastic extremism.

Newt's good at this stuff. He's earned his spot at the top.

Yes, indeed. He's a man of ideas, we are told over and over again. It just so happens that those ideas, such as bringing back child labor and making life even more miserable for the poor, are insane.

4 Comments:

Just another Newtron bomb. Last night he also said we need to return to traditional religion. Does this mean I have to sacrifice a bull today?http://brettcottrell.blogspot.com/2011/11/newts-traditional-relgion.html

The objections to Newt's ideas about allowing kids to work, so that they can learn and empower themselves from that experience are purely partisan, ideological and foolish. Of course it's a good idea for kids to have jobs and earn some money, instead of learning to be helpless dependents (the current model). You should all be ashamed of yourselves for suggesting otherwise. And the "child labor" headlnes on this story are so misleading. Gingrich is clearly in favor of helping kids by instilling a work ethic. Comments in opposition are, then, against kids gaining valuable experience. Despicable.

Helping kids? Please. He could have just said that it's good for kids to have part-time jobs, like a newspaper route or something. A lot of kids do that. But what he said instead was that kids should do the work of currently unionized workers, that they should basically be forced to. That's not instilling a work ethic, that's pursuing a far-right agenda.